BHP Billiton is featured in the opening chapter case as a firm that engages in excellent strategic planning. BHP is an Anglo-Australian multinational mining and petroleum company headquartered in Perth, Australia. BHP also has major offices in London. BHP is arguably the world’s largest mining company and among the top ten largest companies in the world measured by market capitalization. BHP is among the world’s top producers of iron ore, coal, aluminum, copper, manganese, nickel, silver, uranium, and potash. BHP also has crude oil and natural gas holdings. BHP may soon divest its diamond assets. This exercise can give you practice evaluating a company’s strategies. Step 1 Go to BHP Billiton’s website and navigate to the Investors & Media section. Review recent news releases for BHP Billiton. Step 2 Determine what new strategies BHP is pursuing. Step 3 Evaluate BHP’s newest strategies based on concepts presented in Chapter 2. Step 4 Prepare a strategy evaluation report for BHP.

Lodging A travel agent wanted to know whether the price (in dollars) of Marriott, Hyatt, and Sheraton Hotels differed significantly. She knew that location of the hotel is a factor in determining price, so she blocked each hotel by location. After randomly selecting six cities and obtaining the room rate for each hotel, she obtained the following data:

(a) Normal probability plots for each treatment indicate that the requirement of normality is satisfied. Verify that the requirement of equal population variances for each treatment is satisfied.

(b) Is there sufficient evidence that the mean cost of the room is different among the three hotel chains at the  level of significance?

(c) If the null hypothesis from part (b) was rejected, use Tukey’s test to determine which pairwise means differ using a familywise error rate of .